Résumé Long on Politics, but Short on Public Office

She has not held a full-time job in years, has not run for even the lowliest office, and has promoted such noncontroversial causes as patriotism, poetry and public service. Yet Caroline Kennedy’s decision to ask Gov. David A. Paterson to appoint her to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat suggests that she believes she is as well prepared as anyone to serve as the next senator from New York — and is ready to throw her famously publicity-averse self into the challenge of winning back-to-back elections in 2010 and 2012.

Already, some columnists, bloggers and even potential colleagues in Congress have begun asking if she would be taken seriously if not for her surname. Representative Gary Ackerman, a Queens Democrat, told a radio host on Wednesday that he did not know what Ms. Kennedy’s qualifications were, “except that she has name recognition — but so does J. Lo.”

Aside from a 22-month, three-day-a-week stint as director of strategic partnerships for the New York City schools, her commitments generally involve nonprofit boards: the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., the American Ballet Theater, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

But friends and associates say that Ms. Kennedy, 51, is no dilettante, and that her career is replete with examples of the kind of hands-on policy work and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that could serve her well.

Last spring, she joined the search committee for a new director of the Harvard University Institute of Politics, where she and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, her uncle, are members of an advisory panel. The university wanted a big-name politician. But Ms. Kennedy argued for someone who would view the post as a career maker, not a career ender, others involved said.

Her choice was Bill Purcell, a two-term Nashville mayor. Her uncle, whose voice carried the greatest weight on the board, had fallen ill with brain cancer, and might have gone in a different direction, one insider said. But over six weeks, she patiently made her case and eventually won over members of the institute’s board and Harvard officials.

“She’s not shy about pushing people in a direction, and very good at doing it in a way that people don’t even realize they’re being pushed,” said Heather Campion, one board member.

As one might expect, she is also the consummate insider: When Rupert Murdoch’s young daughter was applying to the Brearley School, Ms. Kennedy, a board member who had attended the school and sent her two daughters there, wrote a letter of recommendation, a News Corporation spokeswoman confirmed.

Ms. Kennedy’s work with the city’s public schools has won much attention, but has not been widely understood. Hired in October 2002 (her $1 salary meant she did not have to fill out financial disclosure forms) to overhaul the schools’ private fund-raising, she took on a haphazard operation and gave it a new mission: privately raising seed money to test new reforms, while trying to persuade New Yorkers to get involved in the schools in meaningful ways.

A rock concert in Central Park raised $2 million; a tag sale there drew tens of thousands of bargain hunters. (Some of them, unwittingly, walked off with evening bags that had belonged to her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, according to Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., which sponsored the event.) By the time she left in August 2004, she had raised more than $70 million for an academy to train reform-minded principals. Nearly 200 city school principals are graduates, the majority in high-poverty schools.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein credited her with bringing in a $51 million gift from Bill Gates’s foundation despite lingering ill will over Mr. Klein’s battles with Microsoft while he was at the Justice Department.

Photo

Caroline Kennedy, in 2002, as she announced taking a job with the New York City schools. She held the post for 22 months.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

“She’s good in the room, but she’s also good at getting people to focus and come together quickly,” Mr. Klein said. Ms. Kennedy is now vice chairwoman of the schools’ nonprofit fund-raising arm, but she continues to visit schools across the city, with no entourage or press aide.

Indeed, one of the more interesting hurdles Ms. Kennedy faces would be in telling her story to voters, and to interviewers. Like her mother, she has carefully guarded her privacy.

Yet Ms. Kennedy spent about six weeks barnstorming battleground states for Barack Obama and took to it with gusto: An aide recalled her strolling into a Republican headquarters near Ocala, Fla., and peppering voters with questions at every turn.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

But in brief interviews during the Democratic National Convention, and on “Meet the Press” after she had helped Mr. Obama vet his potential running mates, Ms. Kennedy easily deflected the few serious questions she was asked. She deadpanned to Tom Brokaw that his own name had come up in the vetting. And she dryly told Wolf Blitzer, “I just want to be with the best political team on television as much as I possibly can.”

As a candidate or senator, she would presumably have a tougher time dodging questions.

“Eric was the quiet one, and she was the one that, really, when I said something, asked, ‘Who? Why? How come?’ ” said Representative Joe Baca, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who met with them to analyze the contenders. “She did most of the talking.”

Ms. Kennedy also took it upon herself to write a lengthy memo for Mr. Obama, a senior campaign adviser said. “I think she sized up the field in a way that was thoughtful and sophisticated and right,” he said. “And I think it weighed heavily with him.”

True to form, Ms. Kennedy declined to be interviewed for this article. But she did cooperate indirectly, freeing a few friends and associates, through an intermediary, to discuss her.

They and several others, described a woman who is surprisingly down to earth: who carried sensible shoes in her bag for the walk home from a dressy event at Tavern on the Green; who declined a lift downtown when caught without an umbrella in a rainstorm, instead heading for the subway in a baseball cap; who does not shirk her periodic safety patrol duty, with its reflective vests and walkie-talkies, as a Collegiate School mom; who is an assiduous e-mailer, if not so fast at returning voice mail; who has a personal assistant, but does not use her as a gatekeeper the way so many not-so-famous people do; and who loves to play Running Charades, a version of the popular parlor game.

“There’s nothing at all pretentious about her,” said Jane Rosenthal, the co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival and a longtime friend of Ms. Kennedy and her husband, Edwin A. Schlossberg.

Ms. Kennedy has said that it was her children who got her to give Mr. Obama a look last year. Elaine Jones, a retired head of the NAACP fund, speculated that Ms. Kennedy’s children — her two daughters are in college and her son is in high school — were also the reasons she had not entered public life sooner.

“A fishbowl can adversely affect a child,” Ms. Jones said. “Her mother found a way to keep her children real. Caroline, I think, wanted that for her children. So I think, without knowing it, subconsciously, she was trying to get her kids to this point.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A34 of the New York edition with the headline: Résumé Long on Politics, But Short on Public Office. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe